USA Today Changes Its Mind About Ferguson Police

The news out of Ferguson, Missouri, has been grim and outrageous. After the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, US television viewers have watched a heavily armed and militarized local police force attack and threaten protesters and arrest journalists. As NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams (8/12/14) put it, Ferguson “looked like a police state, using the same tactical getup and the same weaponry we’ve come to expect in urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Today, the front page of USA Today looked like this:

But that’s not what every edition of the paper looks like. Here’s the one I found on the newsstand this morning:

So at some point, someone at the paper decided that the police are not necessarily “seeking order.” To be fair, the paper’s story appears to have been written before the events of last night, which appeared by many accounts to be an escalation. But there was plenty of evidence before yesterday to know that a headline about the police looking to enforce “order” in the face of “furor” was, to say the least, problematic.

Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

Peter Hart seems to be saying that the “order” headline was changed to the “tear gas” one, a sequence I’ll take his word for, though it’s not clear from the post which one actually came first.

Accepting that he’s right about which came earlier, couldn’t he have written an equally critical post, with IMO *better* justification, if the order were reversed, and USA Today changed from “tear gas” to “order”? The “order” version of the headline seems to me to be both less factual and more euphemistic.

As I said, there’s a lot of good work on this blog, but there’s also a certain amount of Rorschach-blotting of random media tidbits into its preferred narrative.

Interesting that there seems to be a story coming out of Bagdad in the column on the right (it is cutoff so it is hard to determine the exact content of that story). If one did not know better, and did not notice the vertical line separating the Bagdad story from the photo of Ferguson, one might think the picture was related to that Bagdad story.

The US is the most frightening and problematic government that has ever existed, Rome notwithstanding I think.

Placing a sniper on an armored car who aims his automatic weapon at individuals who are protesting sends the message to the oppressed, “defy us and we will kill you”. Look out America, this is just the beginning. Homeland Security recently bought millions and millions of hollow point bullets. It will be aimed at us.

I agree with Martin. The 0.1 percent are now in complete control of the government and the media.They’ll soon need military weapons to control the masses and they know it. Cops in camouflage? Tanks on Main Street? Hand grenades and semiautomatic rifles? Look out America indeed.

Peter Hart continually shows he has zero understanding of how a newspaper is published. The headline’s changed to fit the space. There’s no grand conspiracy at play here, with the USA Today suddenly “taking sides” with the Ferguson police. I’d suggest you gain a better understanding of the business. These posts are incredibly misleading.

Ah? Really? And how is the space changed, such that the headlines needed restructuring to fit? Seems like the same size space, in the same place as the other? Perhaps sir, your just another troll from the lame stream media being paid to run around and put obfuscating statements in to make it look like the Lame Stream Media is not playing games.

Or perhaps, if you actually read the whole article you would have seen this.’ To be fair, the paper’s story appears to have been written before the events of last night, which appeared by many accounts to be an escalation. – Peter’

It still stands that there was more than enough evidence that the headline was problematic on it’s own.

hahaha, typical of the commenters here, you just lob idiocy in place of having any real facts. The treatment is totally different. The article is rewritten. Look at the two pages. Headlines are routinely changed per edition based on changes in layout — which clearly happened here. If the paper was “playing games,” as you put it, why would the second treatment include the damning stats about police stops, searches and arrests? There’s plenty to complain about with the media’s coverage of Ferguson, but just taking snapshots of front pages and judging a paper’s position on the events based on a routine change in headlines is simply misleading. That said, it’s typical of what FAIR does, which is to fail to offer broader context while focusing on small incidents that fit the editors’ worldview — sounds an awful lot like the Lame Stream Media, doesn’t it?

That said, it’s typical of what FAIR does, which is to fail to offer broader context while focusing on small incidents that fit the editors’ worldview — sounds an awful lot like the Lame Stream Media, doesn’t it?

No, what is sounds like is we have someone (like you) who is here, trying to marginalize everything that FAIR says or does, simply to protect the Corporate Lords and Masters. Several of you come up with your own lame excuses for the corporate media, and then claim that “no one knows the trouble I’ve seen”. Since your the one taking one single incident out of context (over the years FAIR has consistently called the papers on such things) and trying to make it sound like the only reason the headlines change is because some of something as stupid as the “font” or the point size. The papers are not going to change in size from one minute to the next as the corporation buy the paper by the ton lots, and if the ‘size of the paper changes’ it dramatically changes the operations of the presses. Any “differences” in paper is going to be in the single mil’s, not so significant that a computer operated typesetting machine is going to have re -manufacture the entire headline; not to mention there is 35 characters in the first headline, and 35 characters in the second, in other words it’s the same number of characters and the same amount of space in both papers.

So, talk about misleading, yes, you are. I think your misleading the people here in trying to convince us that your somehow ‘not’ connected to the blog trolls of the lame stream media.

Talk about changing the subject. Who said anything about the point size and printing press. That’s irrelevant. The story was rewritten. The layout was changed. It’s standard for the copy editor to write a new headline, especially with USA Today’s national distribution system — you could easily have editions all over the country with different headlines depending on what time that edition was put out. Other than that, you continue with idiotic claims you can’t prove and grammatical mistakes that would suggest “your” education ended prematurely. Troll.